Arthur Reynolds is a journalist, a former civil servant and government speechwriter.
Swathes of Britain’s top mandarins are working a four-day week by the back door.
FOI data shows that across eight departments, more than 250 Senior Civil servants – the top two per cent of officials, all of whom earn in excess of £81,000 – are working under what’s known in Whitehall lingo as “compressed hours”.
The arrangement is straightforward: officials work a few extra hours a day in exchange for an extra day off a week or fortnight. In theory, you might think this is a common-sense measure, allowing greater flexibility, more time for childcare or other responsibilities.
In reality, it causes chaos.
Those working compressed hours end up logging in when everyone else is at the gym or watching TV. Not all hours worked are equal; there’s no point being online when no one else is – sending messages and emails into a void is inefficient in the extreme.
When what’s known as their ‘non-working day’ comes around, these officials are completely uncontactable to the rest of their team. Got an urgent question you need answering? It’ll have to wait until tomorrow.
These arrangements are difficult to justify for any officials, but for Senior Civil Servants, the practice is indefensible.
Whitehall operates on a glacially slow tiered clearance culture: I send work to my manager, who sends it to theirs, until it crosses the desk of a Senior Civil Servant. Nothing leaves the building without their say so – letters to the public, responses to Parliamentary Questions, briefing notes to No10 – all get delayed thanks to compressed hours.
A despairing Whitehall contact described the results.
One senior official takes Thursdays off; the next person up the food chain does the same on Fridays. That leaves supposedly urgent submissions completed late on Wednesdays stuck until the following week – sorry Minister, you’ll have to wait, the boss isn’t working today. Occasionally, leaders clear work on their day off; sometimes they don’t. That uncertainty creates unnecessary headaches for junior officials who just want to get on with the job.
The scale of the problem is worse than I ever thought possible.
At the Department for Transport, staff up to and including Senior Civil Servants are allowed to work their contracted 37 hours over just three days a week without losing a penny in pay. That means doing three 12-hour-and-20-minute days, or working from 7 am to 7.20 pm with no break for lunch. I’m all for putting the hours in, but no one can expect to be productive on that schedule.
But in Whitehall, what staff want, they get.
A skim through various departments’ flexible working policies shows just how far this logic extends. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology admits ‘it is the aim of the Department to grant flexible working unless there are specific reasons to refuse.’ Let me translate that for you: if someone asks to work four days a week, the answer will almost certainly be yes.
The irony is that the evidence suggests compressed working might not actually be good for staff. Last year, a systematic review found that they increased sickness absence and led to poorer health outcomes. When civil servants already take an average of eight days off sick a year – almost double the national average – this should be a cause for serious concern.
It’s important to stress that the senior bureaucrats these FOIs identified are not languishing in Whitehall backwaters: 24 work at the Treasury, 33 at the Department for Education, and 41 at the Department for Transport. Many departments don’t even bother centrally recording how many of their top brass are working a four-day week, leaving it as a matter for individual line managers, a lack of oversight that creates an enormous potential for abuse.
When I worked on Whitehall, I wondered who was keeping track of the time people on ‘flexitime’ or compressed hours actually put in. Well, I’ve got my answer, and it’s pretty much a free-for-all.
A Labour Party that loves to muse on why government moves so slowly has the power to stop this charade. Although no matter how tempting it is to do so, the blame cannot be solely placed at their door. These working practices became widespread and continued unchecked under the last government. It pains me to echo our critics’ attack lines, but the truth hurts: the Conservatives had 14 years to bash Whitehall into shape and failed to do so.
Yes, Brexit and the pandemic were generational events that sucked up huge amounts of time and energy. No, that doesn’t mean Whitehall should have been given free rein to run itself elsewhere. If the Blairite machine – and its obsession with equality and managing ‘stakeholders’ – had been dismantled by 2016, both crises could have been handled better.
The next right-wing government cannot afford to make the same mistake.
It will have to take the bull by the horns: ending the presumption that officials’ every need must be accommodated, forcing departments to record who is working when, and making clear that the most senior civil servants are paid to be available when government needs them.
But with the Conservatives, Reform and Restore Britain fighting over the same voters, the prospect of a coherent right-wing government looks more distant by the day.
Another Labour government, or more likely a rainbow coalition, would have neither the instinct nor the inclination to take on Whitehall’s working culture. So the steady drift towards the four-day week will continue, and our taxes will keep going up and up to pay for it.